Up until recently, I thought that the US national park was pronounced “yo-semite”, as if it was some sort of ghetto-slang used for greeting a Jewish person.
Ahahhahhahahaaha that’s actually amazing
There was an '80s cop show called Hill Street Blues that had a recurring latino character named Jesus. All I heard as a kid was “Hey, Zeus” so I thought his actual name was Zeus and everybody just said “hey” to him when addressing him.
I thought Yosemite Sam had pretty much taught all English speakers the correct pronunciation. I remember my parents saying their Swedish relatives pronounced it “Yohsmeet.”
I have no idea who that is.
EDIT: Oh, that guy. And now I know his name.
That’s amazing
Wait how do you phonetically say this?
Yo - seh - mit - ee
Doesn’t mean it isn’t cute/funny when it does happen, though. Just this week my SO pronounced chihuahua as “CHA-HOO-A-HOO-A” so I told them “you know this word, it’s the taco bell dog” lol
As a homeschooled kid with a big vocabulary I was largely not able to pronounce (more reading than talking), this is a sentiment I wish I’d heard earlier in life.
I’m sorry. I hate that the stereotype that stuck for homeschool kids wasn’t that they’re often very well read and advanced, because that has been my experience encountering them over the years.
In fairness, that stereotype is largely due to capital H Homeschooled kids like me. as in, the subculture as opposed to simply the method of schooling at home.
If you meet someone who was in the subculture, you need to navigate through a few levels of weird damage before our vocabulary is even close to the most notable thing about us.
“Facade” caught me in high school.
Interestingly (to me), I have the opposite problem in Spanish. I’ve learned mostly through immersion, so when I see a Spanish word written down sometimes I’m like “Holy heck THAT’S how you spell carrot??” Spanish is a language where the spelling/pronounciation rules are really consistent, but it’s still surprising to see some of these words without having ever thought of how they might be spelled. Toallas (towels) got me too.
Also dialects are a thing. The way a lot of words come out of my mouth has been culturally labeled as ignorant. I go out of my way to change my pronunciations at work so I get taken seriously, but I’ve been doing it less now that I’m accepted in that world. Maybe that caps how much farther I can go, but maybe I don’t want to go further if it means continuing to act like people who sound like how I sound are less than
Me as a small children: I’ll PRE-FACE this by saying…
Family: wait, what??
I did not feel honorable…
Me as a grown-ass Spaniard right now: wait, it’s not pre-face? Is it pre-fis?
Pref-is
Damn, thank you
Or… or you read it in the 3 word title of a meme. Doesn’t matter, learned word.
Pour one out for all my epi-tome homies
This was me with a number of words over the years, but most memorable “paradigm.”
The one that wakes me up in the middle of the night is albeït. I thought it was fancy foreign speak pronounced “all bait”, but it is just a short form of “all be it”, is pronounced exactly like that, and is a synonym for “all though it be”.
It was embarrassingly recently that I realized segue and “segway” were the same word which I apparently didn’t know how to spell.
Edit: BTW - the weird way that English words are spelled or pronounced - and why - is one of my favorrite nerd subjects. I love this thread so freaking much. And how RIGHT nearly everyone here SHOULD have been.
segue puts me straight into a fugue state
Pronounced “foog-way”.
master ugue
Yeah, that’s very much an English thing. Many other languages use reasonably consistent spelling and pronunciation, so memorizing the handful of exceptions isn’t really a problem.
However, with English it’s the other way around. You need to memorize the handful of words that are actually pronounced the way they are written. Everything else is just pure chaos. If you read a word, you can’t pronounce it. If you hear a word, you can’t find it in a dictionary.
Kubernetes
Turns out Nginx is not N-jinx
Haha that’s also the most popular pronunciation of nginx that I’ve heard. I try to casually drop engine-x in conversation, reactions vary from confusion to mind blow.
Sich a dumb word, but somehow I never really clicked on this word: “question”. I have spoken the word a lot, but somehow I practiced speaking english less when I moved away from my parents to study. English became more of a read and written language than spoken, so the words became just things to read, not to sound out loud.
After attempting to speak a bit more english again, words were drawn from memory by how they were written. And for some reason the word “question” was incredibly weird. “Kuest-ion”? No, I’m sure there is a “ch”-sound in there. “Kwest-chien”?
I had to check out some youtube videos on pronounciation to get it right.
I’m from American south, I’ve always said and heard “kwest-chen” - now I’m sitting here saying it over and over wondering how much is regional accent
Mispronounced words by British people are unacceptable though. The Brits need to be stopped!
And their wacky spellings.
Seriously though, I know there is no right or wrong, just cultures but “vit-a-min” (vit rhyming with bit) for vitamin , “al-loo-minium” for aluminum and “let-toos” for lettuce is like fingernails on a chalkboard. lol
The origin behind Aluminum and Aluminium is kinda interesting because the inventor that first refined the element used both pronunciations and iirc I believe I he had even a third pronunciation (“alumium”)that never caught on.
I pronounced entrée as “entry” until I was in my 30s. 😭
I pronounced hyperbole as hyper-bowl until my mid 40’s when I finally heard it used in a movie, and had to ask everyone around me if that’s how hyperbole is pronounced. I knew the word genre, but didn’t know that when I read “genre”, it was the same word. I said gen-ree when using genre in a statement well into my late 20’s.
Uuu, how is hyperbole pronounced? Asking for a friend
Hy-per-buh-lee. Weird. Right?
I used to think “chaos” had the same “ch” as “church” when I was a kid. Don’t know why I never heard it spoken aloud by someone earlier than I did.
But the one that I find inexcusable is Southern US people who pronounce “jalapeno” with a “j” and “n” instead of an “ha” and “ñ” even though they know better. Sounds so willfully ignorant
